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For Demacia! A Look At Garen's Kit

Bharhash·9/26/2014, 4:49:53 PM·2 votes·892 views

So I made a discussion similar to this a month or two ago and it didn't get much traction. With Garen getting a buff in this latest patch, my hope is that this is a good time to catch some of that attention and, hopefully, get the attention of some Reds that might be able to give insight as to the why some things are the way they are with our favorite spin2win champ.

Before I get into the talk about Garen's ult, I wanted to talk about his passive change. Garen was the first champ I picked up when I started playing League. It was just an instant attraction. I've seen him fall off as newer champs come out and was sad to see it happen. Now though, I feel like he has a nice identity as a tank that has to be killed or he'll just run off to a push and come spinning out a short time later with near full health. By the end of one game, I was regenerating 120 HP per second out of combat. It was a great feeling to have to be able to run off with barely any health left and rather than fall back to the Nexus to heal, be able to just move to a pushed lane, farm some, and then get back into the fight a short time later. He really has hard presence late game thanks to that sustain, and I think he needs it.

Now on to his ult.

Back in my previous discussion I did a comparison on Garen's ult with Yasuo's and this is the short of it.

Garen's ult at Rank 1 has a 160 second cooldown and does 175 damage + 28.57% of the target's missing health.

Yaso's Rank 1 ult has an 80 second cooldown, 200 base damage per target hit (So a maximum of 1,000 base damage) + 1.5 Bonus AD scaling, blinks him 1200 units away (Garen's ult has a range of 400 by comparison), and after all that, he's given a 15 second armor shred steroid.

Some folks like to say "Oh, but Yasuo is an assassin! He's supposed to do more damage." Fine. Let's look at Garen's closest comparison, Darius.

Darius' Rank 1 ult does 160 true damage, capable of being doubled on a target with five stacks of Hemorrhage (which is not hard on Darius at all), plus .75 / 1.5 Bonus AD scaling. True damage. And, on top of all that, it has a 20 second recast period if he kills the target with it.

There is no argument for Garen's ult that I can think of for having the cooldown that it does that cannot immediately be dismissed by pointing to several other champions. Plain and simple, it either needs more power / utility to maintain its current long CD in comparison to others of comparable duration (Karthus, Amumu, Soraka, etc) or it needs its cooldown sharply brought down.

I didn't really touch on the rest of his kit because I think its, by and large, in a good place. If I was gonna pick on anything else, I'd like to see his Q give him a bit more mobility or soft CC reduction given the high mobility shift in the champion design, as well as the meta. But overall, I'm very happy with his kit. Except for his ult.

10 Comments

redniwediS9/26/2014, 5:14:07 PM3 votes

I've actually supported keeping Garen's ult cooldown where it is in a few posts like this one. It is fairly well timed to keep it from being oppressive. In my personal opinion other ults like the ones you mentioned should be tuned in the same manner. That is, of course, never going to happen.

I wouldn't be against a reduction to the cooldown, as that would provide Garen with a fantastic power spike, but I would actually prefer a boost to it's damage.

Sire Hippington9/26/2014, 6:14:03 PM3 votes

I think Garren is in a good spot now after the passive buffs(half time needed to trigger and 4times the heal after lvl 16 is massive) His kit already is pretty dominating in the early, combined with his very strong singletarget ult, it makes all-ins vs garren pretty impossible for other melees, so it needs such a cd to open windows thre the enemy can atleast farm rather savely.

If he turns out to still be on the weaker sight, i'd rather see some indirect buffs for him via masteries or itemchanges(atmas could use a small buff, like more costs and therefor more armor/crit, and i feel that preserverance was overnerfed a long time ago, and would work well with his passive) other points that should/could get buffed is removing the self-slow on E and changeing W back to total-armor/mr rather than bonus

However, if i was to chage anything about his ult, i would let it deal a part of the damage dealt to the maintarget on aoe if it kills the target, so if u execute a lowhealth mundo, u deal massive aoe, while killing a squishy deals less aoe but therefor u remove a primary target.

Trylobyte9/26/2014, 5:43:03 PM2 votes

I think Garen is in a weak place. His main problem is that in the League of Mobility he doesn't have any - He has a movespeed boost that removes slows when he activates it, but then he runs into the problem that virtually every champion has a slow to land on him. On top of that, he slows himself when spinning. He has no ranged capability so he has to win trades in lane, something he doesn't do very well in the current ranged-top meta. He does bring valuable things to the table, such as his incredible survivability late-game and his ability to stack Black Cleaver on an entire team in less than two seconds, but that comes with the downside of having a top lane bully that, ironically, will almost always get bullied out of lane.

As for his ultimate, its early cooldown is far too long. This is not a game-changer. It's a very short range single-target execute and that's all it is. Yes it has no cost, but in practical terms neither do the ults from mid-laners with blue buff. And Demacian Justice is no Shockwave or Curse of the Sad Mummy or Death Mark or Cataclysm or Equalizer or other skill with potential to win a teamfight. It's just a single-target execute you use to try to keep someone from getting away, and it has tons of counterplay to boot - Any heal, shield, or revive effect will do, as will Flashing out of his range. It just doesn't justify that enormous cooldown.

Bharhash9/26/2014, 6:38:04 PM1 votes

I don't know that I'd say he is dominating early on. A lot of melee tops have some form of ranged poke (Mundo, Pantheon, Malphite), shields (Riven, Pantheon, Malphite) or mobility (Jayce, Riven). Garen has a hard time against these kinds of champs, particularly the ones with the ranged poke, as they can keep his passive shutdown and at that point you basically have to try and all-in your target.

I'd argue that his ult isn't very strong. 175 + 28.57% missing health is not a lot of damage, especially compared to some of the other ults out there. Again, Darius comes to mind. At half health, with no items and base MR, Garen would do about 300 damage to Darius. In turn Darius could do 320 true damage back. And again, Darius has the refresh on his ult if he kills a target with it, and it comes off cooldown 40 seconds faster.

DefNotKessler9/26/2014, 11:17:57 PM1 votes

I made a suggestion in a thread of my own, to add some form of AoE effect upon successfully executing someone.
Since Garens biggest weak points are kiteability and teamfighting(imo), it would give you a specific reason to pick garen and it would fit with that massive awe inspiring explosion

Bharhash10/7/2014, 4:11:34 PM1 votes

One of these days, Riot-senpai will notice me.

Just lowering Demacian Justice to 120/100/80, the same CD rate as Darius' ult, from 160/120/80 would honestly be fine. I wouldn't even gripe that Darius' is an execute with a refresh and Garen's isn't.